1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to equipment rooms and data centers, and more particularly to methods and systems for managing airflow through equipment racks.
2. Discussion of Related Art
In many equipment room and data center environments, electronic equipment is installed in standardized equipment frames or enclosures called equipment racks, for example as defined by the Electronics Industries Association's EIA-310 specification. A data center may have many equipment racks, often located in close proximity to one another. The electronic equipment may include, for example, servers, network routers, data storage devices, telecommunications equipment, and the like, which generates heat that must be dissipated or otherwise treated to avoid adverse effects on the performance, reliability, and useful life of the equipment. In particular, rack-mounted equipment, housed within the confined space of an enclosure, may be vulnerable to an accumulation of heat within the enclosure. The amount of heat generated by a rack of equipment is related to the amount of electrical power consumed by the equipment, the power efficiency of the equipment, and other factors. Furthermore, over the course of time, various pieces of electronic equipment may be added, removed, replaced, or rearranged to accommodate evolving operational needs, which causes variations in the total amount of heat produced within the data center and within each enclosure.
To protect internal components from overheating, a piece of rack-mounted equipment may include one or more fans for drawing cool air across the components, and expelling heated air into the surrounding environment. Other equipment may manage heat dissipation through thermal convection, or radiational cooling, without the use of any airflow devices. Some equipment racks may include fans to provide supplemental cool air to the equipment mounted therein, or to draw hot air out of the enclosure. Additionally, many data centers provide chilled and conditioned air to augment the cooling requirements of the room.
Each of these cooling techniques consumes additional energy. Because the cooling demands of a data center can vary considerably, it is difficult, using known techniques, to achieve energy efficiency. For example, providing an amount of chilled air in excess of operational requirements wastes energy, whereas costly equipment damage may result from an insufficient supply of cool air.